Of Plate, State And The Calculus Of Hope

In my customary purview- nutrition, public health, disease prevention- I have had cause to lament periodically the apparent hegemony of Newton’s third law. For every silly action we’ve taken over recent decades to address the effects of badly constituted diet on weight and health, we have appended an opposing, but comparably misguided reaction. Believe it or not, this pertains to the high drama of our current political situation, too. Let’s start with our plates; the state of the State can wait. In principle, and famously, we had advice some decades ago to reduce our intake of dietary fat. For purposes here, we need not belabor the relevant provisos: the advice originated with studies showing the advantages of the high-fat Mediterranean diet. So, really, it was advice to reduce our intake of saturated fat from the usual sources. The message got mangled as it was passed along, just like in a game of ‘telephone.’ The idea that all dietary fat should be cut, while genuinely favored by some, was actually a distortion of the original mainstream message, but took on a life of its own. Be that as it may, nobody with any actual expertise- not proponents of eating low fat, and not opponents of eating low fat- ever advocated for low-fat junk food. The original idea was to reduce dietary fat intake by swapping out the salient sources in the prevailing diet- fatty meats, processed meats, processed dairy, fried and fast foods, snack foods- for foods naturally low in fat: v...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news